[Writing On Your Palm] This article gets a couple of things wrong
Chris Meadows
Ho-hum. Another article about the "napsterization" of e-books. Shock, horror. Alarums and excursions.
Mr. Stross is only the latest of many to notice that, if more people are reading e-books, e-book "piracy" might actually damage the industry. The jury is out on that, but it is something worth thinking about.
Nonetheless, there are a couple of points in the article that need addressing.
"When the music industry was 'Napsterized' by free file-sharing, it suffered a blow from which it hasn’t recovered [...] according to the Recording Industry Association of America."
This is the fallacy of "post hoc ergo propter hoc". Or, in English, A happened before B, therefore A caused B.
If you listen to the RIAA they'll tell you anything. But all you really have is correlation, not causation. While peer-to-peer is probably a factor, there have been a whole host of economic and market changes in the intervening years which could also be responsible.
And then there's this gem:
"I will forward the suggestion [that writers learn from the example of bands who give away content for free] along, as soon as authors can pack arenas full and pirated e-books can serve as concert fliers."
Why does nobody ever remember Baen and its Free Library?
Here's something to refresh Mr. Stross's memory, from his very own paper:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/19/technology/19BAEN.html
This strategy has also been used by folks such as Cory Doctorow and another writer by the name of Stross—Charles Stross. It doesn't exactly seem to have hurt them either.
Now, this strategy wouldn't necessarily work for all forms of content, and the choice of whether to give work away for free should always reside with the creator of that content—not the pirates. But pooh-poohing the idea that it CAN work in this way is completely asinine.
"I will forward the suggestion along, as soon as authors can pack arenas full and pirated e-books can serve as concert fliers."
- Digital Domain - Will Piracy Become a Problem for E-Books? - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)
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Posted By Chris Meadows to Writing On Your Palm at 10/03/2009 09:43:00 PM
Jesper Anderson
no longer buy much music on CD is twofold; plastic discs of
uncompressed data are impractical to manage, and CD's cost a fricken
fortune for no evident reason.
Physical books share the impracticality, especially given the amount
of travel I try to pack into my life, but the cost is not nearly on
par with the ridiculous pricing of music CD's. And given the media
coverage of how little of the actual CD price which ends up in the
artists hands there is little moral incentive to pay the highway
robbery prices when there is a free alternative a click away.
Plus, the music industry completely botched the whole transition to
electronic distribution by suing and alienating fans instead of
embracing the new opportunities. Some book distributors are already
taking steps to make electronic distribution work for them instead of
against them, and it clearly is working in at least a few cases.
And why does the fact that the book industry is presently relying on
hardback sales mean that this is The One Way It Must Be? Why not rely
on a steady stream of electronic purchases with near zero marginal
cost and no up front printing cost? Sure, the books will still need
editing and marketing, but with low marginal costs and distribution
costs, and the ability to sell directly to cellphones and highly
portable ereaders the potential profit margin is vastly higher.
A luddite article trying to alienate readers from the new, exciting
tools of publication - Mr. Stross does some excellent PR for himself.
Jesper
Bert Latamore
First of all, the recording industry has long been pretty corrupt, with middlemen getting a lot of the money and most artists not seeing a whole lot from traditional recording. I am old enough to remember the Payola of the 1960s-- recording companies were essentially bribing radio disk jockies to play specific songs. Since then it has become an entire industry, with individuals signing up huge numbers of radio stations and controlling what they play. They get paid huge bucks by the recording studios and send some of that along to the stations. Of course all this is on the backs of the artists who actually make the music, but what could you do?
Today of course you can market your music directly on the Internet by giving some of it away for free to attract an audience. Then you can make money with concerts, sale of products such as Tee shirts, etc. And you can turn out a huge number of people who will buy your records when you do sell them, partly out of loyalty for having given away that music. The artists actually probably make considerably more. But for the Recording Industry Assn. and its members this is a disaster. Remember, they do not represent the artists. They represent the recording industry, all the people who live off the artists who now are being disintermediated by the Internet. The recording industry is particularly vulnerable to this because most of us today store, carry and listen to our music in electronic form. Once it is on your MP3 player, it really doesn't matter if you copied it from a physical CD or downloaded it direct over the Internet.
The book publishing industry isn't (as far as I know) nearly as corrupt. But it has out of necessity a similar economy. It takes a lot of people to print and distribute books. All of them have to be paid. And the money comes from the sale of the books. The result is that when you buy a $35 hardback the writer gets probably less than $1.
Ebook publishers like eReader and Fictionwise give the author close to 50% of the cover price of the book. I don't know what the deal is with Sony Reader and Kindle. But the point is, even with some electronic piracy the writer comes out way ahead. And I doubt that we will ever see the sort of mass file sharing for books that we do for music. For one thing, it takes much longer to consume a book. For another, it is an entirely different audience. And third, people are beginning to discover the huge disadvantage of file sharing -- open your computer to file sharing and you open everything on it, not just your music collection. That means you financial and personal information too.
And as you said, giving away books can get you a readership. I listen to free podcasts of books by a horror/SF writer named Scott Sigler. He got a big enough audience that when he finally published his first hardback, "Infected", he turned out his readership to buy the book on the week it came out, and he made the bottom of the NY Time Best Seller list.
Another writer I know, an established horror writer, is talking about sending out an serialized version of a novel he is writing via email, also to create interest and sales.
However, there are advantages to owning physical books. The book Scott got on the HY Times Best Seller list was one he has already sent out as a series of free podcasts over iTunes. Most of the people who bought the book had alaready heard it for free, legitimately. They bought the book in part out of loyalty to Scott.
So yes, I totally agree with you. Electronic media means huge change, and I worry about the replacement of good factual journalism with the screaming opinionated voices of toe blogisphere. But it also offers opportunities for artists of various kinds. Much of the screaming is coming from the intermediaries who are afraid, with good reason, that their businesses and jobs are severely threatened. Don't get me wrong here, I have sympathy for honest people whos jobs are going away. but I don't see it as threatening the creative people as much as many would have us believe.
Bert
Bert Latamore
IT Journalist, Report Writer and Book Doctor
From tweets and blogs to white papers and books --
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